Can you learn Pinduoduo-style fission?

The concept of fission actually existed a long time ago.

"Fancl Style" in 2010, "Too Pretty to Be Talented" in 2015, "Surrounded by Crazy Cats" in the WeChat Moments , "Retweet to Win a Prize" on Weibo, etc. Whether it is a phenomenal case or a small trick circulating among the people, there are countless cases of fission for the purpose of dissemination. At that time, we preferred to call it " viral spread ", and most of the wonderful cases were created by the marketing department rather than the operation department.

It was not until 2016 that Pinduoduo, the monster in the e-commerce industry , showed us the true power of fission for the first time.

Pinduoduo is a product born for group buying. Since its launch, it has come up with countless tricks for "group buying": one-cent lottery group, one- yuan group to attract new members, bargaining assistance, free bills for group leaders, sharing of red envelopes... Not only that, in regular gameplay such as sign-in and lottery, we can still see the temptation of sharing wherever possible - the shadow of group buying is everywhere, and the logic of fission has been rooted in its bones. In the three years since its establishment, Pinduoduo has packaged dozens of gameplays with similar logic and won 300 million users.

How terrible is Pinduoduo’s fission? Taking the "Help with Bargaining" module as an example, you can search for hundreds of groups with the word "bargaining" in QQ, and some groups even charge a fee to enter; you can search for hundreds of product links with the word "enter the bargaining group" in Taobao ; in these groups, members can maintain thousands of messages active per day by just sending links and not chatting; even more, community cultural terms such as "changing knives", "cheating knives", and "one knife for one dollar" have emerged in these communities .

Generally speaking, e-commerce is usually strongly supply chain oriented, but Pinduoduo has built another wall outside of its inherent supply chain advantages - using the group buying fission mechanism to occupy the 1 billion external user pool of the WeChat ecosystem (of course with the support of Tencent). In just three years, it has become comparable to JD.com and is targeting Alibaba .

Of course, there are many imitators , including successful ones such as Mogujie , Miya , Beibei, etc. They used social fission to be reborn on WeChat amid the widespread traffic crisis on mobile terminals. However, there are even more failures. We can’t remember their names, but we often hear their conclusions: Pinduoduo’s success is due to the support of Tencent .

It cannot be denied that Tencent’s investment relationship has helped Pinduoduo greatly reduce the resistance to expansion, but before drawing conclusions about why Pinduoduo’s fission was successful, we’d better first clarify the concept of “fission”.

1. There are two types of fission: propagation-oriented or transformation- oriented

The two types of fission are easy to define. The fissions such as "Vancl", fun tests, and small games in the circle of friends, which are only for obtaining traffic or exposure and do not involve paid conversion, are all communication-oriented; while the fissions such as helping to bargain and share red envelopes, which are for the purpose of registration and purchase conversion, are conversion-oriented.

• Communication-oriented fission is about brand promotion and empty talk , which is mostly done by the marketing department.
• Conversion-oriented fission is aimed at attracting new conversions. It is pragmatic , with complicated indicators and data, and is the responsibility of operations and products.

1. Spread-oriented fission

There are probably the following categories:

(1) Category 1: Fun Test

Here are three tests that have been popular on WeChat Moments recently:

On the left is the Jungian psychological test, in the middle is a life patch update test taking advantage of the release of iPhone XS, and on the right is a social animal prototype test in cooperation with Beike. Coincidentally, all three cases are from NetEase.

These cases have both logical highlights and experiential innovations. Elements such as music, animation, and photos were incorporated into the test, and most of the questions were cleverly related to products (music, games, and e-commerce), reducing the harassment of forced brand exposure.

All three are relatively typical cases. There are QR codes on the pictures. If you are interested, you can scan the QR codes to experience them.

(2) The second category: UGC dissemination

For example, in 2010, “Fanke”:

Hammer's poster generator is "too pretty to be real":

This kind of " viral marketing " is very popular in the Weibo era. It is usually operated by the marketing department and requires the participation of certain celebrities and big Vs. Its success or failure depends not only on planning but also on opportunity.

(3) The third category: social games

For example, the WeChat mini-program "Jump Jump" that was very popular some time ago, the "Surround the Nervous Cat" in the H5 era, and the Moments check-in function of apps such as Keep and English Fluency. These games use points or rankings to inspire users to show off and share, and have gained huge traffic in the WeChat social ecosystem ;

(4) The last category: Weibo "Retweet and Win Prizes" etc.

These are little tricks that are popular among the people, such as “retweet to win a prize” on Weibo, forwarding funny jokes, and collecting likes on WeChat Moments. They are simple but always effective.

From the above fissions, we found that the main task of the entire process is exposure, and all participating behaviors (testing, playing games, generating posters) do not constitute the use and consumption of the product, but are just to create a reason for forwarding.

This type of fission logic is extremely simple, and is essentially a UGC content template: users generate their own content (test results, posters, copywriting , game scores, etc.) through simple input, uploading, and gaming, and forward the content through some kind of social driving force to attract other users to participate. The core and difficulty of event planning lies in social drive - how to design the form and content to stimulate users' desire to show off, seek novelty, and compare, so as to achieve forwarding?

Therefore, the fission of communication orientation ultimately falls on the issue of "social drive". For a detailed study of this issue, please refer to Xu Zhibin's "Ten Social Driving Forces".

2. Transformation-oriented fission

The conversion and fission that Pinduoduo's wild growth relies on is the focus of this article.

We collected all the conversion and fission cases we came across this year and made basic classifications as follows:

(1) It is not difficult to find that those who play with conversion fission are basically platform products with strong transaction attributes such as e-commerce and community O2O . For these platforms, apart from order conversion, there are almost no other ways to monetize traffic , so attracting traffic is not as good as attracting conversion.

(2) Conversion fission must be subsidized, unlike communication fission, where you can just prepare a good UGC template and wait for the results to come. Each completed fission closed loop of conversion fission means a unit subsidy cost. Because there is no marginal cost, the complete closed loop design is very important, because as long as the ROI of the unit closed loop is affordable, the activity can be replicated on a large scale .

(3) Different fission activity closed-loop designs vary, but the basic logic is the same:

Step 1: Offer a benefit point to the user: for example, receive a 88 yuan red packet, get an electric oven for 0 yuan, grab toothpaste for 1 yuan, etc.

Step 2: If users want to get this benefit point, they must complete some invitation tasks, which can be roughly divided into two categories:

• Strong tasks: similar to KPI indicators, responsible for the results. For example, in the 1 yuan new member group, "invite 3 new members to join the group", in the bargaining group, "ask friends to help bargain to 0 yuan", and in the red envelope sharing group, "invite 3 friends to help open the red envelope"
• Weak tasks: such as “Share 3 times to double the red envelope”, “Share to 3 different groups”, etc. Because excessive sharing causes harassment to users, WeChat has restricted this function not long ago, but it only restricts the identification of sharing group behavior, so this gameplay can still be done barely.

Step 3: After completing the help, the invited guest users are attracted by the benefits and upgraded to new initiating main users: participating users of the 1 yuan new customer group, users helping with bargaining, and invited users in the gift invitation will re-initiate the 1 yuan group, bargaining assistance or new customer invitation according to the page prompts and become new main users.

(4) Due to cost considerations, conversion fission often plays some textual tricks and is somewhat deceptive. For example, MissFresh’s “Eat Fruits for Free”, when you click on it you will find that you have to forward it to three different groups before eating the fruits. After forwarding it, you will find that the fruits are free, but you have to pay a shipping fee of 10 yuan, and free shipping if you pay 40 yuan, so just buy some to add to the order. The conditions are exposed little by little, and by the time you find out, they have already taken the bait.

Another similar trick is Pinduoduo's bargaining assistance, where the price is reduced smaller and smaller, from a few dozen yuan at the beginning to 1 cent later. When you have put in a lot of effort and have no way out, you will find that it is much more difficult to get it for 0 yuan than you expected.

The above are the basic logic and characteristics of conversion fission. If you are interested, you can search for the corresponding mini-program in WeChat and give it a try. I believe you will have a deeper understanding of this type of activity.

2. Why can’t we learn Pinduoduo’s fission?

The reason why I dare to write this topic is that our team also tried to open up Pinduoduo's fission traffic channel not long ago.

The company tried to get a share of WeChat's 1 billion traffic pool, but failed.

Of course, we also encountered many problems caused by "not having Tencent as a father", such as template messages being blocked, push interfaces being blocked, mini programs being warned, etc. But to be fair, these small setbacks are definitely not the root cause of failure.

The real logic is very simple: there must be subsidies to do conversion fission, and subsidies will attract freeloaders .

1. Can the platform provide sufficient subsidies to maintain the attractiveness of fission?

When the gathering of freeloaders continues to impact the platform's cost bottom line, can the platform still provide enough subsidies to maintain the attractiveness of fission?

Pinduoduo can do this completely, taking the bargaining group as an example:

(1) Pinduoduo's average order value is very low, about 40 to 50 yuan. The end-to-end supply chain driven by leftover goods, workshops, and C2B ensures that procurement costs are low enough.

(2) Low quality means low price. Everyone knows that Pinduoduo’s products are cheap, but the same products may not be priced low when placed in a bargaining group. A generic electric oven that sold for 60 yuan was bid for 180 yuan by the bargaining group, which is almost equivalent to the market price of an oven of the same brand. But the freeloaders don’t delve into it deeply, let alone care. Can a beggar complain that his steamed bread is black? Instead, I felt that I had gotten a bargain of 180 yuan, and my motivation to bargain tripled.

Compared with Pinduoduo, the platform I work on operates a cross-border e-commerce business with an average customer spending of more than 300 yuan. The few low-priced goods that can be sold are also hard currency with clearly marked prices. It is truly naked and infinitely transparent when used for bargaining groups. In this case, if the difficulty of bargaining is similar to that of Pinduoduo, the cost the platform has to pay is several times higher than that of Pinduoduo. If the difficulty is raised, almost no one can bargain. How long can this activity last?

Pinduoduo's main low-end and opaque supply chain has controlled the unit cost of social fission to the lowest in the industry. With low costs, the difficulty of completing fission can be controlled, and Pinduoduo's "bargaining culture" has been formed.

2. Can we screen out enough qualified traffic from the attracted freeloaders?

To put it bluntly, the "freeloaders" are, to some extent, Pinduoduo's target user group .

As the name suggests, the "wool party" is here to get a bargain. This group can sacrifice a lot of time to pursue the slightest profit. They have no resistance to bargains and are extremely insensitive to quality.

Isn’t this Pinduoduo’s current user base? Although the purchase value of the free shopping party is low, the dissemination value is high. The overwhelming sharing has triggered endless fission in the WeChat ecosystem. Although the traffic brought by the free shopping party is mostly from the free shopping party, Pinduoduo's supply chain happens to be able to take on these free shopping parties. It dares to make the 9.9 free shipping an APP module and put a large number of different products on the shelves every day. How many e-commerce companies can do it?

But for the e-commerce platform where I work, the "wool party" is here to get the best deals. Our users are demanding on brand and quality, insensitive to price, and absolutely unwilling to consume social value in exchange for insignificant savings. Therefore, the bargaining groups we set up are not for our target users, but for the bargain hunters whom we want to avoid. The subsequent conversion rate of these bargain hunters is extremely poor, and our supply chain cannot be connected. As a result, the greater the fission, the greater the loss, and the unit ROI cannot support a closed loop worth replicating.

What do those who have successfully imitated Pinduoduo say?

Mogujie, MiYa, Beibei VIP, Tape Measure Discount... It is obvious at a glance that they are either Pinduoduo in vertical segments or direct copies of Pinduoduo. The biggest common point is that they have a supply chain that focuses on the low-end, and such supply chains basically have the ability to undertake the wool party.

Here is a special case called Qutoutiao . This information flow product, which mainly targets third- and fourth-tier cities, has been online since 2016 and has gained hundreds of millions of users through fission. It was successfully listed on the Nasdaq in September this year. The fission model of Qutoutiao is very simple, which is the distribution system of recruiting disciples: you can make money by reading the news yourself, and you can also make money by recruiting disciples. When the disciples read the news, both you and the disciples can make money. The entire gameplay uses redeemable gold coins as rewards, and uses gamification to provide incentives from various dimensions such as reading time, attracting new users, and retention . The membership system is complete, and those who are interested can download it to play.

The reason why the Qutoutiao case is special is that this "Pinduoduo" of the information flow world is not favored by the industry. Users who convert, consume, and retain due to fission are mostly due to rewards rather than demand for products, and Qutoutiao does not really have any resources to supply to accommodate this group of users. Pinduoduo's wool is one link in the supply and demand relationship, and how Qutoutiao will eventually monetize the users it has gathered should be a huge challenge it faces.

3. Finally, conclusion and mind map

So far, I do not deny conversion-oriented fission. On the contrary, although the effect of the bargaining group module has not met expectations, we are still optimizing and operating it, because as a peripheral communication module, this fission effect is still quite good and can provide stable open source traffic.

What I want to remind you is that unless you have a huge end-line supply chain, or are committed to serving consumers in the third and fourth tier cities, do not regard this fission as the basic traffic model for your product, and don’t even think about getting rich overnight through fission. In contrast, operating fission as a daily module or product function is a good plus point, such as Ele.me ’s red envelope sharing, MissFresh’s 0 yuan fruit eating, and Lian Coffee’s “My Cafe”. Even if it fails to achieve new customer acquisition and fission, the copywriting and processes in the packaging can have a good effect in activation and dissemination.

Source: Operation Dog Oliver